Pages

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

We Got Our Furniture!

Our furniture was scheduled to arrive sometime on Monday morning. We expected them to come around 8:00am because the Japanese have shown themselves to be incredibly punctual. We also had scheduled our loaner-furniture to be picked up that morning as well - hopefully, as early as humanly possible so that we could get it out of the way before all of our furniture arrived.

So when the doorbell rang at 6:58am, I was impressed that the loaner furniture was getting picked up so quickly. A nice Japanese man greeted me and said, "Good morning! I have your furniture to be delivered." WHAT?! The movers were there and ready to begin before 7:00am?? Maybe some American moving companies (or any company, for that matter) should take some notes from the Japanese.... ha!

With only TWO men, they had all of our household goods unloaded and into our 9th-floor apartment by 9:00am. It was amazing. And to help with any confusion, I had numbered the rooms (a sign on the doors) so that instead of wondering if they could understand my English or not being clear about which room was what, I could just say the number and they knew where to take the boxes. A friend had offered to come by around 9:00am to pick up the girls and keep them out of the way, so she was surprised to find the movers finishing up when she arrived. She was still wonderful enough to offer to take the kids over to her place for a while so we could try to get some things unpacked.

Because the Japanese do trash and recycling a little differently than we do in the US, the movers asked if we also wanted them to unpack the boxes so that they could take all the boxes and trash with them. No surprise that it only took them 30 minutes to unpack EVERYTHING. It was great to have all that trash taken away, but when they left, it looked like my house had thrown up on itself. It was overwhelming.

We started putting things away one room at a time, and I was having a horrible time because I had to unpack a lot of cabinets in order to put things in them the way I wanted. In my kitchen, for example, they just unpacked everything and stuck it in cabinets to get it out of the way. So I had to unpack the cabinets again to put things in them. With my house looking like this, you can only guess how stressed I was....

However, by the end of the day, it was starting to feel more like home.

I still have to put things on the walls and organize a few things here and there. But, overall, we don't have too much left to do. When I feel like things are 95% done, I'll post some more photos so everyone can see how I've attempted to make this industrial building feel more like a home. I'm just so happy to have our things back! My mattress has never felt so good!